Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu by Christina Laffin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu by Christina Laffin Roselee Bundy (bio) Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu. By Christina Laffin. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2013. viii, 270 pages. $49.00. The familiar narrative of the history of literary production by court women in Japan has been one of a flowering in the Heian period followed by centuries [End Page 218] of relative insignificance. Social, political, and ideological changes gradually diminished the status of women, with the result that the late Heian and certainly the Kamakura and subsequent periods saw the decline of court women’s writing in Japan, with a few celebrated women regarded as anomalies. Christina Laffin’s recently published study, Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu, is a welcome exploration of this period through the life and works of one “exceptional” woman, Abutsu, best known as the second wife of Fujiwara Tameie (1198–1275), head of the Mikohidari poetic house. Not only does Laffin explore how a medieval aristocratic woman could navigate the challenges of a society that increasingly diminished the place of such women, she argues that “[t]he female diarists, poets, and tale authors canonized as writers of the Kamakura period were exceptional in their attainment of cultural and literary acclaim, but their paths reveal the aspirations shared by many elite noblewomen of their time” (p. 9). Thus, we are provided with a broad understanding of the life choices of medieval women. Laffin’s study is especially rich in her readings of Abutsu’s writings, framing them in relation to the textual tradition she references in her works as well as to the political, social, and legal milieu in which she was active. The author argues that “Abutsu’s autobiographical self is a fictive structure,” her texts written “with specific personal, political, and literary aims, and the texts thus present[ing] divergent self-characterizations” (p. 2). Likewise fascinating are Laffin’s explorations of the possibilities of a tradition of court women’s literary interpretation and practice. Laffin teases out networks and connections among women, both actual and textual, evoking a sense of the women’s own consciousness of their gendered identity as literary producers. Following an introductory chapter in which Laffin reviews the social and cultural changes in Abutsu’s times, Laffin organizes her study into chapters roughly corresponding to Abutsu’s texts and to stages in Abutsu’s life—The Nursemaid’s Letter, Fitful Slumbers, and Diary of the Sixteenth Night Moon—with another devoted to her activities as a poet and scholar of Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji). Early in life, Abutsu served as an attendant in the household of Princess Ankamon-in, receiving training in etiquette and the arts, but she left the court after a failed love affair. A decade or so later, Abutsu wrote Utatane no ki (Fitful slumbers), a narrative about this affair. In subsequent years, Abutsu took up practice as a lay nun in Nara, returning to the capital when she became pregnant. Then, around 1252, owing to her skills as a Genji monogatari reader and copyist, she was introduced to Fujiwara Tameie to act as his assistant and eventually married him. With Tameie’s support, Abutsu sent her daughter to serve as an attendant of an imperial consort. For her daughter’s edification, Abutsu wrote Menoto no fumi (Nursemaid’s letter) to provide career advice and outline [End Page 219] matters such as proper deportment, necessary artistic skills, and the path to high rank. After Tameie’s death, Abutsu was embroiled in legal disputes with Tameuji, Tameie’s son by his first wife, in order to claim the rights of inheritance for her own son. At stake were the rights not only to a landholding but to literary documents and the recognition of her son as heir to the Mikohidari poetic lineage. Abutsu produced a poetry manual entitled Yoru no tsuru (Evening crane), written as “a member of the Mikohidari lineage and an authorized transmitter of their teachings” (p. 121). Finally, her travel diary, Izayoi nikki...